40 Fun Facts About Ferrets

Which Renaissance artist painted Lady with an Ermine, a portrait whose animal looks more like an albino ferret?

Leonardo da Vinci painted the sitter, Cecilia Gallerani, around 1490, and the creature in her arms is too big for a real ermine. Poland bought the picture in 2016 as part of a €100 million deal.

Which Hogwarts student does Mad-Eye Moody turn into a ferret in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire?

Draco Malfoy is slammed against the ground as a ferret after trying to curse Harry from behind. The teacher punishing him is really Barty Crouch Jr, disguised with Polyjuice Potion.

Ferret-legging champion Reg Mellor wore trousers of which color, to better show the blood from ferret bites?

White trousers were Mellor's own addition to the stunt. In 1981 he set a record of five hours and twenty-six minutes, and said the trick was to feed the animals well beforehand.

Which burrowing animals make up as much as 90% of the diet of North America's black-footed ferret?

Prairie dogs supply the ferret's bedroom as well as its dinner: it hunts them asleep underground at night, then raises its young in their burrows.

The word 'ferret' traces back to a Latin word with which literal meaning?

Little thief is the literal sense. The name grew from fur, the Latin for a thief, which is also thought to lie behind the English word furtive.

What is the collective noun for a group of ferrets, historically also written with a 'y' in the middle?

A business of ferrets was once spelled 'busyness', which suits animals that are rarely at rest when awake. Rival terms such as 'fesnyng' are almost certainly errors that crept into dictionaries.

In which Arnold Schwarzenegger film does a pet ferret hidden in a boy's sweater bite the villain?

Kindergarten Cop makes the ferret a class mascot first and a hero second: its bite on drug lord Cullen Crisp lets the boy he has grabbed break free.

Elizabeth Ann, a black-footed ferret born in 2020, was created by which technique from cells frozen since the 1980s?

Cloning made her the first US endangered species ever copied, using cells from Willa, a ferret that died in the 1980s. A domestic ferret carried the pregnancy so that no rare female was put at risk.

At Stalag Luft III, the camp of Great Escape fame, guards nicknamed 'ferrets' crawled under the huts looking for what?

Tunnels were the ferrets' quarry, so the prisoners dug three at once and gave each a code name, Tom, Dick and Harry, to keep loose talk from giving them away.

Ferrets are prized in medical research because they catch and pass on which human illness much as people do?

Influenza passes from one ferret to its cage mates, and even to the scientists handling them, much as it moves through a household. Ferrets were used to study the 2009 swine flu virus.

Which US state joins Hawaii in banning pet ferrets, under a section of its Fish and Game Code?

California bans them outright, yet its vets may legally treat the pet ferrets people keep anyway. Most other state bans were repealed in the 1980s and 1990s as the animals grew popular.

What are young ferrets called, born in litters of three to seven after a six-week pregnancy?

Kits is the name for ferrets under a year old. They are weaned within three to six weeks and are living independently at three months.

A male ferret is known as a hob, but which name is traditionally given to a female?

Jill is the female's name, and breeders keep a separate word, hoblet, for a male that has had a vasectomy.

Which marine member of the ferret's family, the mustelids, has the densest fur of any animal?

Sea otter fur packs up to 150,000 hairs into each square centimetre, because the animal has no blubber and relies on its coat alone to keep out the cold.

Which powerful relative of the ferret can crush a moose's thigh bone to reach the marrow inside?

Wolverine jaws can break bones as thick as a moose's femur, and the animals have even been seen trying to drive bears away from their kills.

Ferrets have no cecum and can barely digest plant matter, which makes them what kind of eater?

Obligate carnivores must live on meat. Pet shops once recommended fruit for ferrets, advice that turned out to be bad for their health.

Which country shipped in ferrets in the 1880s to fight a rabbit plague, then outlawed selling or breeding them in 2002?

New Zealand turned more than a thousand imported ferrets loose on its rabbits. When the rabbits ran short, the hunters switched to native birds that had evolved with no mammal predators at all.

Which conqueror is recorded as using ferrets in a gigantic hunt in 1221 that aimed to purge a region of animals?

Genghis Khan was following an old habit: the Romans probably hunted with ferrets too, and the animals reached the Americas with settlers in the 17th century.

Which New York City mayor vetoed a bill to legalize pet ferrets, likening it to legalizing tigers?

Rudy Giuliani sent council members a memo of talking points against ferrets, and clashed on air with a ferret campaigner who phoned his weekly radio show.

An excited ferret's 'weasel war dance' of frenzied sideways hops and leaps is a signal of what?

An invitation to play is all the dance means, however fierce it looks. Ferrets are notoriously clumsy dancers and often crash into the furniture in the middle of a leap.

The domestic ferret is thought to descend from which wild animal, with which it readily interbreeds?

European polecat ancestry shows in the ferret's dark mask, but the two differ in temperament: the wild animal lives alone, while most ferrets are happy in a group.

Which animals were once classed in the ferret's family until DNA research moved them into a family of their own?

Skunks sit in a family of their own, the Mephitidae. Ferrets keep a milder version of the same defence: a startled ferret can release a scent, though it fades quickly.

Most pet ferrets sold in the United States have had which body parts surgically removed to cut down their smell?

Anal glands are taken out in a procedure called descenting. In Britain and on the Continent it is widely regarded as an unnecessary mutilation.

Pet ferrets 'imprint' on which part of their lives by about six months old, often refusing later changes to it?

Their food preferences set so firmly that a ferret raised on one brand of kibble may refuse another, so owners are advised to offer youngsters many flavours early.

What do owners call the soft clucking noise an excited ferret makes during its 'weasel war dance'?

Dooking is a happy sound. A frightened ferret hisses instead, and an upset one gives a soft squeak.

Ferrets with 'blaze' or 'panda' coat patterns are especially prone to which inherited condition?

Deafness affects as many as 75 percent of ferrets with these head markings. The same defect broadens the skull in the womb, and it resembles Waardenburg syndrome in humans.

Insulinoma, a common cancer of pet ferrets, grows in the islet cells of which organ?

Pancreas tumours of this kind usually strike ferrets aged four or five. Adrenal disease and lymphoma are the other great health worries of ferret owners.

Which canine disease devastated the last known wild colony of black-footed ferrets in 1985?

Distemper is deadly to the species: even a live vaccine made for domestic ferrets killed large numbers of them. Biologists caught the 18 survivors to start a breeding programme.

The black-footed ferret was declared extinct in 1979, until a wild group turned up near Meeteetse in which US state?

Wyoming's colony grew to about 130 animals before disease cut it to 18. Nearly every black-footed ferret alive descends from just seven of those survivors.

Ferret-legging, the stunt of trapping ferrets in one's trousers, was once popular among which Yorkshire workers?

Coal miners made a contest of it in the 1970s. One theory traces the stunt to poachers, who hid their illegal hunting ferrets down their trousers when gamekeepers came by.

The fur called ermine, used to trim the robes of British peers, is the winter coat of which relative of the ferret?

Stoat pelts were once sewn together by the dozen to line coronation cloaks, and the black marks dotted across the fur are the tips of the animals' tails.

Which famous painter of American birds co-wrote the first scientific description of the black-footed ferret in 1851?

John James Audubon and John Bachman introduced it in their book on North American mammals. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had crossed its range decades earlier without meeting one.

The ferret's wild ancestor carries the Latin name Mustela putorius, whose second word has which meaning?

Stench is the sense of putorius, a fair label for an animal that marks its territory with a particularly foul-smelling liquid. Its Middle English name, foumart, meant foul marten.

Which author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull also wrote The Ferret Chronicles, a series of novels about ferret heroes?

Richard Bach wrote and illustrated the five short novels, set in a world where intelligent ferrets live alongside humans and run a rather smoother society.

In which 1982 sword-and-sorcery film do two ferrets named Kodo and Podo travel with the hero, Dar?

The Beastmaster gives Dar an eagle and a black panther as companions too, and he ends the film travelling on with Podo and two baby ferrets.

A ferret named Felicia was put to work cleaning narrow tubes in the early 1970s at which American physics laboratory?

Fermilab's staff sent her through the tubes trailing a string, then used the string to pull a cleaning swab through. She wore a diaper on the job and was rewarded with raw meat and fish.

A 1390 English law limited hunting with ferrets to laymen who met which requirement?

Owning enough land meant holdings worth forty shillings a year. Poorer laymen caught with ferrets, greyhounds or nets faced twelve months in prison.

Which Nordic capital began using ferrets in 2009 to keep its population of city rabbits in check?

Helsinki chose ferrets because, in a built-up area, they were judged safer and less damaging to the surroundings than shooting. Finland had no tradition of ferreting before then.

Hawaii bans pet ferrets because the state regards them as potential carriers of which virus?

Rabies fears drive the ban, and Puerto Rico has a similar law. Many US military bases prohibit ferrets as well.

In ferret racing, a staple of British country fairs, the animals compete by running through what?

Lengths of pipe make up the course, and spectators place small bets on which ferret will emerge first. The races are run for fun, not as serious gambling.